Business enterprises are increasingly subject to global competition. Typically, each enterprise attempts to present its offerings (e.g., products and/or services) to prospects (e.g., existing or potential customers) in the best possible light to increase the probability of winning sales pursuits. Innovation is a factor that is increasingly important in the sales process and is sometimes the key factor in winning or losing a deal. For example, if one or more prospects perceive an offering of an enterprise as lacking innovation, those prospects may pass on the offering of the enterprise, which may lead to lost revenues for the enterprise.
Selling with innovation is typically challenging. What constitutes innovation may be very different for different people, even for the same offering. An offering that is innovative from one prospect's perspective may be perceived as mundane to another prospect. For example, a first prospect may view the use of MICROSOFT POWERPOINT in “portrait mode” (rather than in the typical “landscape mode”) as highly innovative. A second prospect may view a PhD dissertation in computational linguistics as innovative. The second prospect would likely reject the POWERPOINT-in-portrait-mode example as trivial, while the first prospect would likely view the PhD dissertation as risky, futuristic, and unready for implementation.
Moreover, different people within the same organization may perceive the innovation level of the same offering differently from one another. For example, a data-mining and text-mining offering for a warranty system may be difficult to understand and appreciate for a first director-level person; whereas, another director-level person in the same company may readily understand and appreciate such an offering.